Bill Frezza is a 35-year veteran of the technology industry. After graduating from MIT with degrees in both science and engineering, Bill spent his early years at Bell Laboratories. Since then, he has worked as a product manager, salesman, marketer, entrepreneur, consultant, technology evangelist, and venture capitalist. Bill holds seven patents and has been investing in early-stage tech startups for the last 17 years as a partner in a venture capital firm. Since 2008, he has been writing weekly opinion columns for publications such as RealClearMarkets.com, Forbes.com, the Huffington Post and Bio-IT World and appeared regularly on TV and radio outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and WBAL. In 2011, he was a finalist for the Hoiles Prize for excellence in American journalism and in October 2013, he became the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 2013-2014 Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow. In January 2014, Bill began hosting RealClear Radio Hour airing Saturdays on Boston’s WXKS 1200AM & WJMN 94.5FM-HD2.

Governor Walker's Victory Spells Doom For Public Sector Unions

Public sector unions have reached their high water mark. Let the cleanup begin as the red ink recedes.

Despite a last-minute smear campaign accusing Scott Walker of fathering an illegitimate love child, the governor’s recall election victory sends a clear message that should resonate around the nation: The fiscal cancer devouring state budgets has a cure, and he has found it. The costly defeat for the entrenched union interests that tried to oust Walker in retribution for challenging their power was marked by President Obama’s refusal to lend his weight to the campaign for fear of being stained by defeat. We’ll see how well this strategy of opportunistic detachment serves in the fall as Obama reaches out to unions for support.

This fight is not without precedent. Progressive patron saint Franklin Delano Roosevelt—who more than any other president set our country on a course away from the founding principles of limited government—knew that public sector unions would be the death of the social welfare state he worked so hard to create. Hence, he consistently opposed allowing government employees to unionize. Today, Greece sets the example of what happens when public sector unions gain the upper hand.

In 1959 Wisconsin became the first state to allow collective bargaining by government employees. The projected cost of supporting Baby Boomer union retirees now threatens to bankrupt the state, as it does many others. Scott Walker ran for office promising change. The fiscal medicine he is administering may be bitter, but it looks like it is starting to work. The state budget has been balanced. The unemployment rate has been dropping and is now below the national average. Property taxes are down. Fraudulent sick leave policies—which allowed employees to call in sick and then work the next shift for overtime pay—have been ended. The government has stopped forcibly collecting union dues from workers’ paychecks.

Best of all, the myth that union bosses represent their members’ interests has been exposed as a lie. Now that union dues are voluntary, tens of thousands of union members have stopped paying them. Membership in the Wisconsin chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union (AFSCME) has dropped by half. Membership in the state’s American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is down by over a third. Given unions’ influential role in most elections, the national implications of this trend are staggering.

Walker’s message is clear: The key to bringing balance back to public sector labor relations and balance state budgets is to break the iron triangle of closed-shop mandatory unionization, compulsory dues collection, and oversized campaign donations to politicians that promise to do the unions’ bidding. If other governors take his cue and take up the cause, that giant sucking sound you hear will be the air coming out of union bosses’ bloated political action budgets.

The work in Wisconsin is not complete. The controversial law exempted police and firefighters, a political concession to get the legislation passed. Federal courts have zeroed in on this anomaly, striking down certain sections of the law because they do not treat workers equally. This needs to be repaired— by rescinding the exemption for public safety workers. With the recall election behind him, Walker may be sufficiently emboldened to do just that.

The power of private sector unions was long ago broken by many heavily unionized companies going bankrupt. While this was painful for both workers and shareholders, the economy motored on as nimbler non-union competitors picked up the slack. This approach is problematic for the public sector because bankrupt state and local governments cannot be replaced by competitors waiting in the wings. Yes, citizens can always vote with their feet, emptying out cities like Detroit, leaving the blighted wreckage behind. But isn’t Walker’s targeted fiscal retrenchment less painful than scorched-earth abandonment?

Chicago machine candidate Barack Obama rode into office to the tune of Hail to the Chief, promising the unions that backed him the gift of card check elections, ending the secret ballot that shields employees from union intimidation. He may well ride into retirement to the tune of On Wisconsin as the era of closed shop unionism comes to an end.

Bill Frezza is a Boston-based writer and venture capitalist. You can find all of his columns, TV, and radio interviews here. If you would like to have his columns delivered to you by email, click here or follow him on Twitter @BillFrezza.

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If Public Employees want any Rights they are going to have to fight for them. Big Government will always win because they have the power of law. The only real power employees have is the power to Strike. It’s time they used it. Public employees could do like the Police and Firemen do, use “Blue” outs, “Sick” outs etc. That’s why Walker and the Republicans exempted Police and FD. If they want bargaining “rights’ it’s going to require fighting fire with fire.

Why did Walker and Pubs exempt Police and FD? They tend to Strike, or have “Sick” outs. A few years ago the Firemen were starting their own fires over a contract dispute. Notice the Big Government Republicans went after the “Women”, primarily “Teachers” and exempted the “Men”. Why? There is a lesson in there for all you Teachers.

The creation of the “Union Shop” came about in the early 1900′s – use Russia and Lenin as an example – in order to demand a living wage the “worker” had to leverage from those who “own the means of production” a livihood. A single worker had no leverage and his daily rate was less than 10 cents a day.

Refreshing as your wind may blow, alot of it comes off of the dessert – the one where nobody has a dime, nobody has any medical coverage, nobody has even a day off (Labor Day was the first effort to end that strangle-hold over the worker) and those who own the “means of production” enjoy lavish incomes, lives, etc.

Fraud in Unions might occur – end the fraud, do not end the Union – whatever your complain of workers coming together to obtain a share of the profits – that is free enterprise – it is the right of the worker to be paid a living wage.

Your election-winning, waving-a-flag at the death of something union, try keeping even your own job without the Teamsters, etc. who keep salaries, etc. inline with other news-producing agents.

If you follow the “snake” theory of the baby-boomers??? think of a huge anacandona with a huge blob moving thru it – before the blob is a small snake and in back of it there is a small snake – but where the blob is, a huge, distended gut.

Time and the period of time in which the baby boomers live is like that snake – they are a huge proportion of the population – smaller populations before them, smaller populations in back of them. Of course the current income rates of states can’t “support” the babyboomers – they paid into stuff to pay for themselves; and only when those funds have been fraudently misspent do you have situations where something is needed for the babyboomers and they have not already paid for it.

People trying to end unions will find the US et. al back into the Middle Ages.

The fact that the Unions were able to force a recall without even any allegation of malfeasance just based on the fact that a conservative who ran as a conservative successfully and then got the agenda he campaigned on enacted into law is chilling.

The fact that the election was even close is even more so.

The recall was approved based on fraudulent signatures. The scary thought is that perhaps they just underestimated the number of fraudulent votes needed.

It was a decisive, but not crippling defeat for the union thugs. They will be back and if the next official they target is a bit less charming or articulate, he will suffer the fate of Gingrich, who it turned out did nothing he was accused of.

That one sentence gets to the heart of what the recall effort was really all about. Mandatory public employee union dues are a political money laundering operation for the Democratic party. The Dems know their cash cow will dry up if workers have a choice about paying union dues.

This victory in Wisconsin is the victory of the people against the perverse relationship between Unions and Democrats. This is going to have serious implications for the general election in Novermber, not because a Republican won the recall election but because the people are understanding which is the way to get out this messy economy. The right policies have nothing to do with Obama’s ones. Wisconsin has cleared it up.